In the end that was offset significantly by the retention of value. In particular the second gen model that ran from 2003-2009. Toyota being able to keep up with demand is a more recent phenomenon, as such the secondary market was very kind fo Prius owners in the 2000s. People who got the tax credit and got out about 3-4 year in did quite well.
Enterprise customers don't just roll out browsers. They do testing, they tweak the configuration and then they roll it out. Having to take the extra step to configuring some settings doesn't sound like a deal breaker. If anything, it sounds like a feature enterprise could really use. If your organization is whining about this, they likely aren't following due diligence in testing the browsers in the first place.
The states with some of the lowest Health Care spending (compared to other US states) have the best outcomes. You look at a state like Minnesota which is highly regulated, mandates Health Insurance Companies are not for profit and allows "never pay events" (medical mistakes neither the patient nor insurance company have to pay) and they have some of the best outcomes.
I'd also point out that high medical costs are often attributed to lawsuits. I would point out that Texas passed Tort reform a long time ago and the highest cost counties in the US are in Texas.
Bottom line, you want lower cost health care you restrict profiteering and you don't reward bad behaviors by doctors or insurance companies.
Fracking: The problem isn't the process itself, it's the waste water. The industry wants to drill a well somewhere and dump it untreated in the ground. Millions of gallons of new water put into the ground all at once as a lot of unintended side effects. If there were to treat the water and then use it above ground there wouldn't be so many issues. But that's expensive and cuts into the profit margin. I think Fracked petro (crude) is a bit less than $30/barrel, they turn around and sell it for $100/barrel. How are they going to feed their kids if they have to spend $5-10/barrel on water treatment.;)
Gas and Hydrogen: I think they are steps in the right direction. My understanding is the range on a heavy truck with LNG is 600+ miles. There's already over 100,000 busses and fleet trucks using LNG. The biggest issue people have with the Nat Gas act is they would put controls on exporting LNG. Basically keeping it from becoming a globally priced commodity. That irks a lot of old world petro that has schemes to take all this natural gas the US is producing, liquify it and sell it on the global market.
Anyway, the long term goal in my mind is hydrogen using a solar GaN-Sb process. Back in August University of Kentucky made some headlines about splitting Hydrogen from water using solar energy a the fairly inexpensive GaN-Sb catalyst. If that were to actually scale that could really shake up energy markets.
Final thoughts - We're in the situation we're in because things are sold on global markets. I remember 15 years ago an analyst saying the "US cannot afford to have a Chinese middle class. If they can afford cars gas will skyrocket." That's not all on China either. There's a lot of money to be made with speculation and market manipulation, and there really aren't any controls to stop that. Getting us in a situation where countries produce their own energy is the only way out.
Very true. Which is why Keystone is going to the golf coast. So that the crude can be refined and then loaded onto ships and sold overseas. In fact there's a $2bn anual tax incentive to take canadian crude and ship it overseas. Long term the US tax payer is the one that pays for the Pipeline via tax incentives.
If you wanted to lower gas prices in the US you would pass the Pickens Plan (the bi-partisan Natural Gas Act that was recently filibustered in the senate by those beholden to big oil) to convert comercial semi's to Natural Gas (by the way the original conversion from gas to diesel took 5 years). And then you tax the crap out of petroleum exports. You put those tax dollars into renewables and building a hydrogen infrastructure.
By the way one of the biggest by-products of natural gas production is hydrogen. So if we're going to push natural gas we might as well collect and distribute hydrogen the same time. Supply and demand at work.
And just like an Airline Employee Global Entry allows you access to crew lines at customs and immigration. Given the amount of time the interview process takes it's not worth the money or hassle for someone that doesn't travel much. But if you travel several times a year it's a big plus... well until too many people enroll.
A lot of public companies decimated their college hire programs over the last decade. Usually the focus has become MIS grads groomed for middle management of offshore resources. Basically it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. "We use off shore because we can't find people." Yeah and you can't find people because you refuse to put money into college hires.
College hires are more likely to get involved with start ups and small consulting companies. Both are fine, but neither prepare one for corporate work.
Despite what the media would have people believe, there are standards for loan underwriting at the DOE. I would contend an energy production project is far easier to underwrite because their aren't a lot of unknowns. Durability of pannel, average sunlight in a year, transmission costs, these are all pretty well known factors. Whereas a new technology project has a lot of unknowns about yields and comercial viability. Like I said before, the solar farm project the gov't loaned money to generally have 20+ year contracts with local utilities. The risk to the tax payer in those cases was pretty low and so far is paying off quite well.
I would point out that Solyndra was one of many green programs under the loan program. The vast majority of them did just fine. Surprisingly the best performing are the solar farms because the loans were backing projects that had 20-year energy purchase agreements.
Twin Creeks doesn't make solar cells. They make machines used for making the major component of the cells. They have production ready machines for sales right now. According to the Wall Street Journal article they are quite happy to sell the machines to Red China and the WSJ thinks that's who's going to buy most of them given they have the capital and they don't have irrational politicians that think "green" is a bad word. We could be making the cells here in the US. But that's not going to happen because it's more politically expedient to sell out the countries future for short term gains. The end result is this technology will create a few hundred jobs in the US to make the specialized machines. Most of the end products will be purchased by European and Asian customers who have a long term energy policy.
This isn't a DMCA issue per se. The issue is they went with what they thought was the legal way of doing things. That is to say they actually licensed a DVD CCA license for the product. They were issued a DVD player license key and could lawfully use the DVD logo on their machine and marketing. The problem more or less is a contractual one between them and DVD CCA because they tried to do things on the up and up. There are other products out there that do the exact same thing. They aren't being sued because they aren't bound by a license agreement.
I think there's more than just one solution. These days there's a lot of virtual and remote desktop applications. If you have a nice physical hardware barrier I think that's the best route to take. It will keep the employer from snooping and keep you off IT's radar.
I would also say that a lot of companies have intelectual property clauses that claim rights (at a minimun) to their time, their equipment. From that stand point I never work on my own projects on company hardware.
The sales are low because the ads for the Car say it's only available in a limited area. Most people assume it's not for sale in their area. And then even then the marketing for this car is dumb. The car is actually most useful in smaller metropolitan markets where the commit is less than 20mi each way. You've almost never run the gas engine in those situations.
Japan has had disruptive (think far worse than the US Tea Party) since the 1950s. Usually they are ultra-nationalist and far right parties. When they are mild they are just yelling and screaming at street corners and town meetings. When they are their worst they have vans with loud speakers where they drive around spewing their vitriol and generally annoying everyone around. I'm sure this device (albeit misguided) is the answer to that.
Interpol is just an administrative organization. They run the databases that alert other nations of warrants. They really have no standards for what they allow. For instance just last month Interpol allowed a warrant from Saudai Arabia for a Saudai social media blogger who was critical of the muslin faith and saudai government. He was detained in Malaysia on his way to New Zealand from the Interpol warrant and put on the first plane back to Saudai Arabia. He will most likely be executed (typically by beheading).
Spot on. Conferences have notoriously bad security. The guys manning the door are usually temp workers or low wage security guards. They have very little incentive to go the extra mile. If anything, they are there to challenge entrance by anyone who doesn't look like they belong. (i.e. Homeless vagrant, teenagers who keep walking on the lawn, etc.) Your average rock concert will have much better security.
A little perspective, the Key Stone pipeline represents a $2bn tax subsidy for refineries based tax loop hole (which lord knows Congress isn't about to fix). Key stone represents taking oil sands, one of the most expensive sources of oil on the planet, and ships it to gulf coast refineries. Let there be no mistake, very little of that gasoline will sold in the US. Yes, the US imports 9bn barrels of Crude a day, but we're on track to export more than that amount in refined Gas, Diesel and Jet Fuel.
So I would suggest instead putting a mear $10m into a DoE project we put $2+bn into NG and LNG for comercial vehicles. And while we're at it, since Hydrogen is one of the major byproducts of NG and LNG production, why not work on putting that infrastructure in too at the same time for consumer vehicles?
NEC got his with this hard. Chinese pirates actually created a phantom NEC, complete with business cards, sales offices, etc. They branded and sold many consumer goods that NEC never made. NEC didn't realize it was happening until they started getting complaints about warranty service for the knock off products.
The iPhone stove is an act of stupidity really. Even the cops would know it was fake on first site. On the other hand a Panasonic, GE, or LG products could go years before getting caught.
Doubtful, in particular for 720p+ res MPEG-2. The CPU on the Pi is pretty weak sauce. 700Mhz ARM11. For instance if you wanted to play an MPEG-2 stream (ATSC Over the Air Television) the processor would most certainly fail trying to decode the standard 18Mb/sec 1080i stream. The Pi has some of the same XBMC issues as the Apple TV 2 in terms of low power processor and limited codec support. Although in the case of the Pi a lot of the Codec are actually on chip, but the code to unlock it hasn't been purchased.
In the grand scheme of things having to drop $10-20 on a bunch of licensed codecs is not the end of the world and would still make the Pi way less than anything else out there. If you've got the time or desire to do the experimenting I think the Pi is the way to go. But if you want something to play your NAS full of Torrents and Broadcast caps, then Boxee is the way to go. If you don't mind living in the Garden then ATV2 is the way to go.
Boxee and the Current crop of Google TVs have the same problem. They threw their lot in with Intel for the the System on Chip family (CE4X00 series). A ton of things are provided by Intel from Video, Flash, The problem is Intel has dropped this business line. It's basically has a skeleton crew of developers for upkeep, but it's pretty obvious from the bugs that have stuck around that Intel is phoning it in until their contractual obligations end.
Google has already announced a new hardware platform, it's not clear what boxee is going to do.
Raspberry Pi is pretty limited at the moment in terms of things it will play. That's more or less a licensing issue for them. For instance it could decode MPEG2, but since that's a $5-10 license to unlock that functionality on the SoC, it's not presently doing it. I think people are going to be able to do some really neat things with the UI via XBMC with the Pi, but as far as the number of Codecs supported the Boxee is going to be king.
Water contamination and geological instability is thought to be an artifact of pumping the waste water back in the ground after the fraking is complete. Which doesn't have to happen, but is expensive to treat.
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In the end that was offset significantly by the retention of value. In particular the second gen model that ran from 2003-2009. Toyota being able to keep up with demand is a more recent phenomenon, as such the secondary market was very kind fo Prius owners in the 2000s. People who got the tax credit and got out about 3-4 year in did quite well.
Enterprise customers don't just roll out browsers. They do testing, they tweak the configuration and then they roll it out. Having to take the extra step to configuring some settings doesn't sound like a deal breaker. If anything, it sounds like a feature enterprise could really use. If your organization is whining about this, they likely aren't following due diligence in testing the browsers in the first place.
The states with some of the lowest Health Care spending (compared to other US states) have the best outcomes. You look at a state like Minnesota which is highly regulated, mandates Health Insurance Companies are not for profit and allows "never pay events" (medical mistakes neither the patient nor insurance company have to pay) and they have some of the best outcomes.
I'd also point out that high medical costs are often attributed to lawsuits. I would point out that Texas passed Tort reform a long time ago and the highest cost counties in the US are in Texas.
Bottom line, you want lower cost health care you restrict profiteering and you don't reward bad behaviors by doctors or insurance companies.
Fracking: The problem isn't the process itself, it's the waste water. The industry wants to drill a well somewhere and dump it untreated in the ground. Millions of gallons of new water put into the ground all at once as a lot of unintended side effects. If there were to treat the water and then use it above ground there wouldn't be so many issues. But that's expensive and cuts into the profit margin. I think Fracked petro (crude) is a bit less than $30/barrel, they turn around and sell it for $100/barrel. How are they going to feed their kids if they have to spend $5-10/barrel on water treatment. ;)
Gas and Hydrogen: I think they are steps in the right direction. My understanding is the range on a heavy truck with LNG is 600+ miles. There's already over 100,000 busses and fleet trucks using LNG. The biggest issue people have with the Nat Gas act is they would put controls on exporting LNG. Basically keeping it from becoming a globally priced commodity. That irks a lot of old world petro that has schemes to take all this natural gas the US is producing, liquify it and sell it on the global market.
Anyway, the long term goal in my mind is hydrogen using a solar GaN-Sb process. Back in August University of Kentucky made some headlines about splitting Hydrogen from water using solar energy a the fairly inexpensive GaN-Sb catalyst. If that were to actually scale that could really shake up energy markets.
Final thoughts - We're in the situation we're in because things are sold on global markets. I remember 15 years ago an analyst saying the "US cannot afford to have a Chinese middle class. If they can afford cars gas will skyrocket." That's not all on China either. There's a lot of money to be made with speculation and market manipulation, and there really aren't any controls to stop that. Getting us in a situation where countries produce their own energy is the only way out.
No, it's tax incentives for conversion and infrastructure.
Very true. Which is why Keystone is going to the golf coast. So that the crude can be refined and then loaded onto ships and sold overseas. In fact there's a $2bn anual tax incentive to take canadian crude and ship it overseas. Long term the US tax payer is the one that pays for the Pipeline via tax incentives.
If you wanted to lower gas prices in the US you would pass the Pickens Plan (the bi-partisan Natural Gas Act that was recently filibustered in the senate by those beholden to big oil) to convert comercial semi's to Natural Gas (by the way the original conversion from gas to diesel took 5 years). And then you tax the crap out of petroleum exports. You put those tax dollars into renewables and building a hydrogen infrastructure.
By the way one of the biggest by-products of natural gas production is hydrogen. So if we're going to push natural gas we might as well collect and distribute hydrogen the same time. Supply and demand at work.
And just like an Airline Employee Global Entry allows you access to crew lines at customs and immigration. Given the amount of time the interview process takes it's not worth the money or hassle for someone that doesn't travel much. But if you travel several times a year it's a big plus... well until too many people enroll.
A lot of public companies decimated their college hire programs over the last decade. Usually the focus has become MIS grads groomed for middle management of offshore resources. Basically it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. "We use off shore because we can't find people." Yeah and you can't find people because you refuse to put money into college hires.
College hires are more likely to get involved with start ups and small consulting companies. Both are fine, but neither prepare one for corporate work.
Despite what the media would have people believe, there are standards for loan underwriting at the DOE. I would contend an energy production project is far easier to underwrite because their aren't a lot of unknowns. Durability of pannel, average sunlight in a year, transmission costs, these are all pretty well known factors. Whereas a new technology project has a lot of unknowns about yields and comercial viability. Like I said before, the solar farm project the gov't loaned money to generally have 20+ year contracts with local utilities. The risk to the tax payer in those cases was pretty low and so far is paying off quite well.
I would point out that Solyndra was one of many green programs under the loan program. The vast majority of them did just fine. Surprisingly the best performing are the solar farms because the loans were backing projects that had 20-year energy purchase agreements.
Twin Creeks doesn't make solar cells. They make machines used for making the major component of the cells. They have production ready machines for sales right now. According to the Wall Street Journal article they are quite happy to sell the machines to Red China and the WSJ thinks that's who's going to buy most of them given they have the capital and they don't have irrational politicians that think "green" is a bad word. We could be making the cells here in the US. But that's not going to happen because it's more politically expedient to sell out the countries future for short term gains. The end result is this technology will create a few hundred jobs in the US to make the specialized machines. Most of the end products will be purchased by European and Asian customers who have a long term energy policy.
This isn't a DMCA issue per se. The issue is they went with what they thought was the legal way of doing things. That is to say they actually licensed a DVD CCA license for the product. They were issued a DVD player license key and could lawfully use the DVD logo on their machine and marketing. The problem more or less is a contractual one between them and DVD CCA because they tried to do things on the up and up. There are other products out there that do the exact same thing. They aren't being sued because they aren't bound by a license agreement.
Goes to show, no good deed goes unpunished.
Except in Japan where they have had the technology for 10 years. There might be a cross-license situation for Japanese brands.
I think there's more than just one solution. These days there's a lot of virtual and remote desktop applications. If you have a nice physical hardware barrier I think that's the best route to take. It will keep the employer from snooping and keep you off IT's radar.
I would also say that a lot of companies have intelectual property clauses that claim rights (at a minimun) to their time, their equipment. From that stand point I never work on my own projects on company hardware.
The sales are low because the ads for the Car say it's only available in a limited area. Most people assume it's not for sale in their area. And then even then the marketing for this car is dumb. The car is actually most useful in smaller metropolitan markets where the commit is less than 20mi each way. You've almost never run the gas engine in those situations.
Japan has had disruptive (think far worse than the US Tea Party) since the 1950s. Usually they are ultra-nationalist and far right parties. When they are mild they are just yelling and screaming at street corners and town meetings. When they are their worst they have vans with loud speakers where they drive around spewing their vitriol and generally annoying everyone around. I'm sure this device (albeit misguided) is the answer to that.
Interpol is just an administrative organization. They run the databases that alert other nations of warrants. They really have no standards for what they allow. For instance just last month Interpol allowed a warrant from Saudai Arabia for a Saudai social media blogger who was critical of the muslin faith and saudai government. He was detained in Malaysia on his way to New Zealand from the Interpol warrant and put on the first plane back to Saudai Arabia. He will most likely be executed (typically by beheading).
Spot on. Conferences have notoriously bad security. The guys manning the door are usually temp workers or low wage security guards. They have very little incentive to go the extra mile. If anything, they are there to challenge entrance by anyone who doesn't look like they belong. (i.e. Homeless vagrant, teenagers who keep walking on the lawn, etc.) Your average rock concert will have much better security.
A little perspective, the Key Stone pipeline represents a $2bn tax subsidy for refineries based tax loop hole (which lord knows Congress isn't about to fix). Key stone represents taking oil sands, one of the most expensive sources of oil on the planet, and ships it to gulf coast refineries. Let there be no mistake, very little of that gasoline will sold in the US. Yes, the US imports 9bn barrels of Crude a day, but we're on track to export more than that amount in refined Gas, Diesel and Jet Fuel.
So I would suggest instead putting a mear $10m into a DoE project we put $2+bn into NG and LNG for comercial vehicles. And while we're at it, since Hydrogen is one of the major byproducts of NG and LNG production, why not work on putting that infrastructure in too at the same time for consumer vehicles?
NEC got his with this hard. Chinese pirates actually created a phantom NEC, complete with business cards, sales offices, etc. They branded and sold many consumer goods that NEC never made. NEC didn't realize it was happening until they started getting complaints about warranty service for the knock off products.
The iPhone stove is an act of stupidity really. Even the cops would know it was fake on first site. On the other hand a Panasonic, GE, or LG products could go years before getting caught.
Illinois alone has had four governors go to Federal Prison.
Doubtful, in particular for 720p+ res MPEG-2. The CPU on the Pi is pretty weak sauce. 700Mhz ARM11. For instance if you wanted to play an MPEG-2 stream (ATSC Over the Air Television) the processor would most certainly fail trying to decode the standard 18Mb/sec 1080i stream. The Pi has some of the same XBMC issues as the Apple TV 2 in terms of low power processor and limited codec support. Although in the case of the Pi a lot of the Codec are actually on chip, but the code to unlock it hasn't been purchased.
In the grand scheme of things having to drop $10-20 on a bunch of licensed codecs is not the end of the world and would still make the Pi way less than anything else out there. If you've got the time or desire to do the experimenting I think the Pi is the way to go. But if you want something to play your NAS full of Torrents and Broadcast caps, then Boxee is the way to go. If you don't mind living in the Garden then ATV2 is the way to go.
Boxee and the Current crop of Google TVs have the same problem. They threw their lot in with Intel for the the System on Chip family (CE4X00 series). A ton of things are provided by Intel from Video, Flash, The problem is Intel has dropped this business line. It's basically has a skeleton crew of developers for upkeep, but it's pretty obvious from the bugs that have stuck around that Intel is phoning it in until their contractual obligations end.
Google has already announced a new hardware platform, it's not clear what boxee is going to do.
Raspberry Pi is pretty limited at the moment in terms of things it will play. That's more or less a licensing issue for them. For instance it could decode MPEG2, but since that's a $5-10 license to unlock that functionality on the SoC, it's not presently doing it. I think people are going to be able to do some really neat things with the UI via XBMC with the Pi, but as far as the number of Codecs supported the Boxee is going to be king.
Water contamination and geological instability is thought to be an artifact of pumping the waste water back in the ground after the fraking is complete. Which doesn't have to happen, but is expensive to treat.